Has anyone replying to op actually played older editions or is 5e your only dnd experience?
I have at least 10 years more gaming experience than OP and have played all the old editions back to BECMI (oops, except 4e, my bad). My DM has played for even longer than that starting with Chainmail 3e. It’s not something I bring up very often because it doesn’t really matter. It’s an appeal to authority, a logical fallacy, to refer to one’s experience rather than make a sensible argument that others can understand and which holds up to scrutiny.
Edit: I just realized OSR4ever is not the OP. Apologies for conflating the two. OP has not made an appeal to authority.
Has anyone replying to op actually played older editions or is 5e your only dnd experience?
BECMI Basic and a little AD&D. Probably somewhere between 1st and 2nd Ed. I played when 2e was coming out but my DM was old school. I remember THAC0 and it's not nearly as hard as people make it out to be. I lost interest, came back for 5e, but have had friends that played 3 and 4.
My friend still had 4th edition rules, and I looked at the phb, and was like "f*** that" and was more interested in reading her other TTRPG game handbooks...
Every level comes with new super powers, no one really earns anything.
In my 2e game, they earn every power, every ability and every level.
When a character dies in 1e or 2e, it usually takes few hours of counselling to get over it.
5e players go out of their way to kill their character just to play something else.
In 2e, when they level, they get better at what they do. Fighters are hitting more, rogues get better at thief skills, and Wizards and Priests get better at casting their spells.
In 5e the skills are all shared, including thief skills,
all classes have the same combat bonuses,
spells are locked in at their level, unless you spend a higher spell slot, and
they are limited to 3 magic items, which means getting loot is typically meaningless by level 6.
As a DM, i can't reward them with magic items, if its not better than the 3 they have.
concentration on spells prevents my casters from being creative with spells and spell combinations.
I was wondering if any DMs have dealt with similar issues, and how they deal with it?
So, getting back to the OP, lol...
Please pardon me for how I mangled the quoted section above -- my goal is to highlight the points you raise so I can step back and really get into those things. I will use the same numbering I dropped in the above.
1) I agree with this as a "feeling" -- especially around the nature of the Features gained, but more importantly in the sense of not feeling as if they are earned. Fundamentally, they are earned, of course -- the character advanced a level, and presto, they get the ability. About two-thirds of the way through my last campaign, when the players hit level 13 or so, the players started to feel that really strongly, especially as the scope and realization of what the campaign would entail started to become clearer. In my fellow DM team* meetings, we decided that we would start doing the advancement as a roleplay mechanic -- to advance a level, they have to go and do something to learn how to do that. This has had an impact; downtime, a thing we call "montages"**, and sometimes little fetch quests under the direction of an NPC teacher. I don't recommend it for everyone, because it takes effort, time, and usually involves setting up something to justify all of it, plus you have to balance a bunch f individual play sessions in a collective manner and it is just flat out hard.
2) We used to do something like our solution to 1 above in the 90's, which is where the idea came from. However, note that one of the big shifts was that they took all those things you would learn to do in 5e from all the magic items that you would fight for in 2e. This contributes to the feeling -- for each really cool ability, there is an adventure, a story behind it, and that is lost unless you find a way to bring it back, which is why the "training montage". We try to make the experience feel like they have to do something to get the feature. In the upcoming campaign, this is a major part of the plotlines.
3) We achieved this by focusing more on development of characters. We are big on role playing collectively (not so much individually), so the overall impact starts at the Zero Sessions (we typically have two to four). During this, we collectively create our characters in a nice friendly chaotic mess that allows the DM for that Campaign to be involved and collect potential key notes from everyone. Big focus on personality and personal versus cultural values (we add a bunch of things to this). In short, we take the time to develop them, and the group effort style mans everyone plays off each other and challenges each other so there are rarely a lot of "i play this kind of character and only this kind" stuff. The last session of this sort is always a pure role play session where the players have the task of figuring out how they all ended up together, so DMs don't have to railroad them to start the game.
4) We do get this sometimes. Mostly among our younger players, who often want to be better than Mom, Dad, or Sibling, or feel like they aren't contributing enough. No solution: we just let them do it.
5) Technically, in 5e, this is true of all the classes. The "cool thing at every level" stuff that makes them superheroes. For my next campaign, I seriously undercut that, while still giving them the something at every level bit. It is a straight homebrew, based wholly in the setting, and essentially throws them into an option pool because I rewrote all 17 classes to fit the world and created a new way of dealing with such things that mitigates the need for sub-classes while preserving player options/choices.
6) The very first almost enraged bit of our learning 5e was that they essentially killed the things that in 1e/2e had made Rogues so important and special. While we understood the basis of "well, aren't these things anyone can do?", we didn't like that they didn't let Rogues be extra special good at it. So we have been tweaking the Ability Skills and I even brought in some ideas from 2e to sorta amp this up in the form of NW Proficiencies. That is carrying forward to next campaign, and while I am sure some folks would say the approach "breaks bounded accuracy", we don't give a fig. It is more fun for us this way. Each DM has a different way of handling this, though.
7) Given the UA discussion, I am willing to bet the minmaxers would disagree, but I understand your point here. I have a personal investment in the importance of knowledge, and since we do have a lot of teens and early 20's folks, us old folks have an interest in showing the why education and learning is important -- why is it that a Wizard (who, presumably, has spent all their time learning magic and not had time to learn sword craft) have the same ability to use a long sword as a fighter, who presumably had to train for hours in the use of it? Different solutions by each of the DMs, including a couple who changed nothing.
8) Different solutions, but we did collectively decide that we all wanted to use a spell point system and I confess we essentially re-created the magic system for some of our games. We still use the standard in some campaigns, but by and large we are moving over to the new magic system. It doesn't have concentration in the traditional sense, but it does engage the action economy directly, requires verbal and somatic components for everything, and is a bit more narrative and supports building drama. Also not recommended for everyone.
9) in 5e, the reason they have the rarity system is to essentially argue in a very light handed way that Tier 1 characters shouldn't have magic items, tier two should have one, tier three should have two, tier four should have three. This presumes items that require attunement, which we all still have as far as I know. A couple have gone to five items, and others have been playing with the attunement system. Since I am re-introducing +5 and +4 weapons (always in the Legendary class) for my next campaigns, I basically restructured how magic items were organized to reflect the setting (which has a place that creates some very common and practical magical items (candle wand: lights candles) and has rules for creating magical items I expect my players will take advantage of). Literally anyone can create a magical item. It just ain't easy and they can't do it alone unless they really know magic well and are very experienced. It was possible because we re-did the spell system.
10) "but the reward is how much we love each other!" Ok, ok, yeah, this is a problem and that's linked to the above. Magical items are rare, comparatively. I don't usually give them to NPCs myself, and I more or less follow the unstated suggestion that magical items have a purpose in the story rather than be a Power Up. Older versions of D&D treated magical items as the equivalent of the special power up for a character. 5e says they aren't and shouldn't be important, and I disagree, so we also have magical items that duplicate a lot of the features, which means in the "Aspect System"*** folks can choose a different path in developing their character. So suddenly, magical items have become a key point in character development, and can even change an entire build.
11) Variable solutions, including none. In my case, because the new system wipes out concentration, and the mana usage is interesting, we essentially give metamagic to everyone if they want it, and it uses mana to change spell properties (except for casting time and components) in a way that mixes the "at higher level" and metamagic changes. It increases the creativity -- and I note that we also really put a lot of work into elemental spells and created a system for mage duels.
None of the above is the "best" or even "better" than 5e, it is simply different and how we addressed complaints we have. I am only responsible for about half of them, and then only because I have been creating a whole new world of large scale, which I haven't done in probably eight years or so, having done smaller worlds/settings that didn't need much. But all of us wanted to go back to an immersive model, and I had an itch to do some mythopoet stuff, so it has become a thing.
* = My group is 27 regulars with up to 6 others who float in and out, and there are 6 DMs, who meet about once a quarter to discuss things for characters moving between campaigns/one shots/playtesting, rulings, and general rules thoughts. Collectively, the principals have been playing together since 1980, and everyone else is a friend or family member of them.
** = Training Montage; we are all huge movie buffs (well, except for the kids, who are video game fans), and I mean that in the 'we will have group sessions and critique the hell out of a film's writing, direction, acting, cinematography, etc.' way that can get annoying and is so spoiler filled we have rules on who can join us. We stole the idea from action films. The mechanic is four to six "this is what happens" with a (DM start, Player response, DM close) format that round-robins each "happens" for each player. This is also when "downtime crafting" happens.
*** = Aspect System is what we are calling the way I reset the idea of subclass/feats and other "gained over time" stuff into a series of options that are in addition to Core Archetype capabilities that are part of the class. It will all be a thing that is released free for folks to tear into tiny bits in December.
Have I "actually played earlier editions"?
Yeah. I was a snob and thought less of the B/X editions, and started and stayed with AD&D (1e), and didn't really like the way the Basic/Expert sets where set up as game stuff (I thought them rather juvenile - but I was rather juvenile at the time, soooo) and I outright laughed and mocked and eerided the BECMI set that was that line's version of 2e. Killing it when they went to 3e was one of the best ideas they had, I recall thinking.
Fortunately, I have aged somewhat well on the mental and emotional fronts ;)
Only a DM since 1980 (3000+ Sessions) / PhD, MS, MA / Mixed, Bi, Trans, Woman / No longer welcome in the US, apparently
Wyrlde: Adventures in the Seven Cities .-=] Lore Book | Patreon | Wyrlde YT [=-. An original Setting for 5e, a whole solar system of adventure. Ongoing updates, exclusies, more. Not Talking About It / Dubbed The Oracle in the Cult of Mythology Nerds
These are exceptionally optimized and very luck player-characters.
They are official sample characters released by TSR for use in official modules. I don't know how they were generated -- I suspect they were actually characters from EGG's private games as they're a crazy mishmash of levels -- but they're most certainly representative of how the game was expected to be played.
Has anyone replying to op actually played older editions or is 5e your only dnd experience?
I first played with blue box basic in, apparently, 1979, as I had the version that had chits instead of dice. I've played every edition except AD&D 2e.
Every level comes with new super powers, no one really earns anything.
In my 2e game, they earn every power, every ability and every level.
When a character dies in 1e or 2e, it usually takes few hours of counselling to get over it.
5e players go out of their way to kill their character just to play something else.
In 2e, when they level, they get better at what they do. Fighters are hitting more, rogues get better at thief skills, and Wizards and Priests get better at casting their spells.
In 5e the skills are all shared, including thief skills,
all classes have the same combat bonuses,
spells are locked in at their level, unless you spend a higher spell slot, and
they are limited to 3 magic items, which means getting loot is typically meaningless by level 6.
As a DM, i can't reward them with magic items, if its not better than the 3 they have.
concentration on spells prevents my casters from being creative with spells and spell combinations.
I was wondering if any DMs have dealt with similar issues, and how they deal with it?
Sorry. Stealing because I'm lazy.
1. Meh. Completely untrue/misrepresentation. I just looked over my sorcerer for an upcoming campaign and was surprised at the vast no man's land of abilities between 6 and 12, followed by a few ASI's. Maybe it's the subclass (aberrant mind) maybe it's dependent on choices I have yet to make, but not every level.
A lot of levels though. The proficiency bonus going up and the ASI's are a bad combo that will get you up near +10 far quicker than you probably should. Otherwise it's generally dependent on class. Most levels are just standard spell progression that's been there since AD&D or it's extra damage in one form or another that's about the same throughout editions.
2. Ok. Gold star? I'm a storyteller DM. I move their level up as they fight bigger things and need the level. I know, milestone isn't for everyone....
3. I dunno. I died quickly. Embarrassingly quickly in Advanced. Basic let me live a little longer. I was not happy with advanced killing me so quickly (bad die rolls), but I was never really attached to characters. They didn't live long enough.
4. Never saw character in 5e self terminate. I've seen players swap them out for something they find more fun to play.... but death is hard in 5e... and that's generally more the complaint.
5. Yeah... and....?
6. This IS my biggest problem. On a DC 10 check, even without proficiency, and with "meet it beats" you've got quite the edge in making a check. With prof bonus, it requires about a DC 15 to kinda get 50/50 odds, and with tools to give advantage? It's crazy.
And then back to those ASI's. 2 points means +1 to ALL checks under each stat. You could be a wizard that invests your ASI's in dex for ac staring at about 12 or 14 and by the end of it you're so good at sleight of hand you can pick most locks simply because your ASI's took you up to a 20 dex.
If your class is without any chance of knowing what to do and not having any tools, you can attempt crazy stuff and still have more than a modicum of a chance of pulling it off.
This isn't even to mention the bounded range is so narrow that most things become pass fail.
Now you can adjust the DC on a skill check up or down for a character, but that's a shrug and a guess as is and definitely too.ambiguous a judgement call.
The skills need some serious reworking.
7. And....? Everyone's weapon proficiencies are different, and the bulk of damage doesn't come from the weapon but the class features. I'm hazy on over 30 years of life experience in between now and last time I looked at it, but the weapon damage itself hasn't changed much and it still was about class granted damage and not what you swung with. Though I vaguely remember something about arrows that let you do multiple "shots" way back when in 2e's weapons and equipment supplement. Most of what happened simplified.
8. Spells being locked except upcast.....HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA... that's cute. In Advanced spells didn't upcast and you had to use a slot to memorize a spell for each instance of use. You want dancing lights 3 times buddy,(and dancing lights was about all you got level 1-3 ish) you had to have 3 instances of dancing g lights memorized. You have NOOOOOOOO clue what the hell you're talking about here... don't even get me started on the lack of cantrips...
9. Yeah a lot of people bemoan how meaningless money is. And how easy magic items break games. It concerns me and doesn't. I like magic items not being a make or break feature. You can run an entire campaign without them and that's awesome. Unfortunately you have to be extra careful giving them out. I wish they had more variety and flexibility than just plus 1's or spell charges that refill. Tbh they're pretty dull, but also that's the only thing players seem to care about and want.
Oh yeah. Gold. Most of the time in stories, unless poverty is a struggle to overcome, they handwave expenses. I guess it really hasn't come up, but it probably is a good idea to just deplete savings from time to time.
10. Attunement? Stops you from being overpowered as all shit. Which is what your complaint in 1through 6 are about. MOVING ON.....(yeah, that spell complaint really got me..)
11. Yeah, you can, and they can sell them... or whatever they want really. There's never been a game where they'll swap good equipment for worse. I don't swap out my steel hammer for a fisher price one because I happen to find it l, do I?
12. I swear you played 3 and you're a wizard main now complaining because wizards aren't overpowered enough. You talk about 1 and 2 but you have absolutely no goddamned clue about the magic user class from those games. 3 and 3.5, from all that the people I know who played it, indicate it was where 90% of these complaints come from and because you were SPOILED. 3was the game that was where you were beyond overpowered didn't have to concentrate metamagicked the hell out of everything, rules lawyers your DM into oblivion and had about 37 books to pick and choose your godlike optimized first level character's abilities.
In which case, pathfinder is for you. Not 1st or 2nd, or even 4th or 5th. And good luck.
I had to stop reading because I was getting an anxiety attack.
Clearly, your experience and mine vary. I have been DMing since 1979 and have played every version except 4. My favorite was 3.5, but I currently play 5. Each version of this game has had merit. People will have versions they prefer and versions they hate. DM’s kick out the rules they don’t like, such as the exploit that allows mages to avoid counterspells by readying their action, or the whole attunement thing (2 of my peeves). But that string of accusations about the game and it’s treatment of characters share no common ground with my experience. Characters don’t earn abilities? Of course they do…just like the characters of every other version. In D&D 2e, those characters could earn a +5 sword, but here they can only acquire one that’s plus 3. Game balance.
The rules of every expansion were more or less balanced to fit the big picture. If a DM disagrees with the merits of a rule, he or she has always had the power to remove or change it. My players are all old school, long-lived players. We have seen a lot in game and in life. We just completed a three year 5e campaign which was awesome. It wasn’t awesome because of the version we are playing, nor in spite of it. It’s because we had fun doing it together.
In the end, that should be the only thing that matters. So you and your friends should have fun playing any way you want.
I had to stop reading because I was getting an anxiety attack.
Clearly, your experience and mine vary. I have been DMing since 1979 and have played every version except 4. My favorite was 3.5, but I currently play 5. Each version of this game has had merit. People will have versions they prefer and versions they hate. DM’s kick out the rules they don’t like, such as the exploit that allows mages to avoid counterspells by readying their action, or the whole attunement thing (2 of my peeves). But that string of accusations about the game and it’s treatment of characters share no common ground with my experience. Characters don’t earn abilities? Of course they do…just like the characters of every other version. In D&D 2e, those characters could earn a +5 sword, but here they can only acquire one that’s plus 3. Game balance.
The rules of every expansion were more or less balanced to fit the big picture. If a DM disagrees with the merits of a rule, he or she has always had the power to remove or change it. My players are all old school, long-lived players. We have seen a lot in game and in life. We just completed a three year 5e campaign which was awesome. It wasn’t awesome because of the version we are playing, nor in spite of it. It’s because we had fun doing it together.
In the end, that should be the only thing that matters. So you and your friends should have fun playing any way you want.
Cheers.
That's fine but 1 was brutal. And 5 although a cake walk by comparison to 1 is not the system that is exploited to hell and back.
all of the statements read of someone who likes the min/max experience but wants to complain of power creep.
Starting off with comparisons to 1 and then bringing up DMing since 79.... it's not going to make me bow down to you.
Look. 5e is a simple edition. By the way the UA's are being complained about and the changes they are wanting g to implement, chances are they're going to come out with something much more closely aligned to 3.5 because there's way too many people trying to minmax right now, and I'm going to have to sit this one out till 7e comes about.
Like I said, I got my 5e books, I got copies of basic BECMI and I got AD&D. I can wait till it shifts back again, or I can just give up the hobby entirely. I got plenty of other stuff to do.
But I will NOT play crunchy fancy calculator games.
TreantMonk, who is a notorious min-maxer, came out with a video today where he has calculated the DPR of many of the heavy hitters, and then compared it to the new and improved UA Warlock (remember, this is at least the 3rd crack by wotc at it for the new edition, and time is running short). He could not even fit the new warlock on the damage chart, because it was so out of whack with everything else.
THAT is the problem with 5e. wotc comes up with these "cool and fun" builds...but fun for who, exactly? Certainly not the other players, as they watch their chars being way out-performed by some I-win button. And most certainly not the DM, who has to deal with such a char. 5e is broken, and wotc is doubling down on that, not trying to fix it. If wotc was serious about improving the DM experience, they would be nerfing/banning many many of the subclasses they have created, not buffing everything in sight.
But no, that takes courage and foresight, and an understanding of the game. And the people that would appreciate such courage are NOT wotc's target market.
TreantMonk, who is a notorious min-maxer, came out with a video today where he has calculated the DPR of many of the heavy hitters, and then compared it to the new and improved UA Warlock (remember, this is at least the 3rd crack by wotc at it for the new edition, and time is running short). He could not even fit the new warlock on the damage chart, because it was so out of whack with everything else.
THAT is the problem with 5e. wotc comes up with these "cool and fun" builds...but fun for who, exactly? Certainly not the other players, as they watch their chars being way out-performed by some I-win button. And most certainly not the DM, who has to deal with such a char. 5e is broken, and wotc is doubling down on that, not trying to fix it. If wotc was serious about improving the DM experience, they would be nerfing/banning many many of the subclasses they have created, not buffing everything in sight.
Yeah, I saw it. His videos are crap. It's white room and he talks out his ass about the rogue, especially the UA 6 "improvements" which were none except to sacrifice damage for piddly status effects.
That aside, their "updates" are trash because they're catering to that minmaxer crowd he's a part of. Like I said, cribbing notes from 3.5/pathfinder
Yeah, I saw it. His videos are crap. It's white room and he talks out his ass about the rogue, especially the UA 6 "improvements" which were none except to sacrifice damage for piddly status effects.
That aside, their "updates" are trash because they're catering to that minmaxer crowd he's a part of. Like I said, cribbing notes from 3.5/pathfinder
The reality of game design is, a team needs both the "Here, cool idea!" person and the "You realize that the your idea is broken" person, and 5e is short on the latter. There's something of a fine line to walk -- you want something with enough quirks that people can have fun searching out the weird interactions, but not so many that it becomes broken.
Yeah, I saw it. His videos are crap. It's white room and he talks out his ass about the rogue, especially the UA 6 "improvements" which were none except to sacrifice damage for piddly status effects.
That aside, their "updates" are trash because they're catering to that minmaxer crowd he's a part of. Like I said, cribbing notes from 3.5/pathfinder
The reality of game design is, a team needs both the "Here, cool idea!" person and the "You realize that the your idea is broken" person, and 5e is short on the latter. There's something of a fine line to walk -- you want something with enough quirks that people can have fun searching out the weird interactions, but not so many that it becomes broken.
Agreed but that's more staff and they won't be as creative as I'd like
You missed what OSR's point is, which is that you shouldn't have to homebrew the shit out of everything.
I didn't miss that point, I just don't agree with it. You don't need to homebrew any rules to make 5e work, just the adventures. And the entire fun of being a DM (at least to me) is homebrewing the adventures, so I don't see the problem
I have said twice now that I completely agree the prepackaged adventure modules that WotC sells nowadays are ridiculously easy. Don't conflate them publishing stupidly easy adventures with the 5e system itself being easy. You can very easily write impossibly difficult adventures in 5e, and you can very easily write stupidly easy adventures in 2e. If the DM wants someone else to write the adventures and then play them as-written straight from the box, I definitely do agree that 2e would be superior for that type of DM. But that's a complaint about WotC adventures, not the 5e system
You missed what OSR's point is, which is that you shouldn't have to homebrew the shit out of everything.
I didn't miss that point, I just don't agree with it. You don't need to homebrew any rules to make 5e work, just the adventures. And the entire fun of being a DM (at least to me) is homebrewing the adventures, so I don't see the problem
I have said twice now that I completely agree the prepackaged adventure modules that WotC sells nowadays are ridiculously easy. Don't conflate them publishing stupidly easy adventures with the 5e system itself being easy. You can very easily write impossibly difficult adventures in 5e, and you can very easily write stupidly easy adventures in 2e. If the DM wants someone else to write the adventures and then play them as-written straight from the box, I definitely do agree that 2e would be superior for that type of DM. But that's a complaint about WotC adventures, not the 5e system
Again, this returns to the point with CR in relation to encounter design; they're looking to allow for enough flexibility of play that people can run a sequence of encounters without taxing the party. Plus keeping the premade adventures simple makes it easier for a group of people who all don't know much about D&D to pick one up and start playing. Some people might want to be "challenged", but most players would probably quickly get frustrated if the adventures they paid money for kept killing their characters rather than progressing. And, to address the issue of story quality, expecting a major stream tier campaign to come from an adventure book is just unrealistic; those are stories that are tailored to the players as they go, so there's no way you can break that down into something you could sell to the whole community.
And regarding the idea that DM's shouldn't be expected to homebrew, that's literally been the entire basis of D&D since pretty much the outset. They give you a framework, you build and expand on it to make it your own.
You missed what OSR's point is, which is that you shouldn't have to homebrew the shit out of everything.
I didn't miss that point, I just don't agree with it. You don't need to homebrew any rules to make 5e work, just the adventures. And the entire fun of being a DM (at least to me) is homebrewing the adventures, so I don't see the problem
I have said twice now that I completely agree the prepackaged adventure modules that WotC sells nowadays are ridiculously easy. Don't conflate them publishing stupidly easy adventures with the 5e system itself being easy. You can very easily write impossibly difficult adventures in 5e, and you can very easily write stupidly easy adventures in 2e. If the DM wants someone else to write the adventures and then play them as-written straight from the box, I definitely do agree that 2e would be superior for that type of DM. But that's a complaint about WotC adventures, not the 5e system
This is the part where we simultaneously agree and disagree.
I agree that adventure writing is bad, not just because it's easy, but it's also just bad adventure writing. I agree that this is not a system problem. Terrible adventure writing has been a problem through the "official" channels so far back as I can remember so adjusting, adapting and customizing adventures for your needs I agree is just part of the DM experience, I doubt most DM's see it as a burden.
That said, I do think that 5e has architectural design problems that require the DM in the course of adventure adaption and storywriting, to address these system problems.
For example, monster design is catastrophically bad, to such a point that there aren't any monsters in the monster manual that you can just use as written and have anything interesting happen in combat. The most common complaint I hear from 5e DM's is "combat is boring or slow, how do I fix it". The issue here is that monsters are just bags of hit points in what is definitively a game with a tactical mini-combat ecosystem that takes increasing amounts of time to execute with the increase in character levels. The monsters however don't do anything interesting tactically. Predominantly all monsters do is move and attack, which makes them pale in comparison to the various powers, abilities and executables that players have, reducing combat to a roll-off between the player's various abilities vs. monster bags of hit points.
This is just one of many architectural issues that DM's must address to make the game fun and exciting for players.
Other core issues include Class balance, the "expert skill problem", high-level scalability, the "magic solves everything" problem, the "alpha strike" problem, the "I go down and get up again, you can never keep be down" problem. There are so many fundamental issues and all of them creep up in the course of adventure and campaign writing because any one of these can completely spoil an otherwise interesting and fun adventure.
So homebrewing adventures, I fully agree is a DM tradition and expectation, re-designing the game to actually make adventures fun and interesting, that is not something that has ever been required or should be expected of the DM. The game system should work as designed, as written and we will simply have to agree to disagree, because no, I don't think 5e works at all as written. You have to make heavy alterations to force it to work and make it fun.
Now the good thing with 5e is that it's been around long enough that there have been supplements that address many of these issues, all of them are 3rd party supplements, but that is neither here nor there. For example Flee Mortals addresses the monster design issue quite expertly, so there are more options available for DM's today than ever before.
Yeah, I saw it. His videos are crap. It's white room and he talks out his ass about the rogue, especially the UA 6 "improvements" which were none except to sacrifice damage for piddly status effects.
That aside, their "updates" are trash because they're catering to that minmaxer crowd he's a part of. Like I said, cribbing notes from 3.5/pathfinder
The reality of game design is, a team needs both the "Here, cool idea!" person and the "You realize that the your idea is broken" person, and 5e is short on the latter. There's something of a fine line to walk -- you want something with enough quirks that people can have fun searching out the weird interactions, but not so many that it becomes broken.
Brokeness in an RPG is not as clear-cut an issue as it is in other sorts of games. If you can build a multiclassed, pole-arm master, pact of the blade, hexblade, (or whatever) warlock with all your invocations and spells chosen to maximize your murder output, is that a problem? Maybe, but probably not. If your average melee warlock is consistently outclassing the fighters, then you have problem.
It's certainly something for them to take a look at, and maybe they'll take steps to rein it in, but if they do, it'll be because of the average case. And maybe their fixes will leave the warlock still a bit too much murder, or a bit too little, but it doesn't really matter unless it's significant enough to affect the feel.
(And I don't think they're trying to please the minmaxers with their changes. They're giving more options, and that always gives opportunities for optimizing, but it doesn't seem to me to be their goal. (Their actual goals seem to be murky. I think the licensing backlash has made either design or management extremely skittish about upsetting the player base (even though that would be a different kind of upset), and it's making them overconservative.))
D&D has never been an action movie/arcade game style game though. If that is what someone is looking for, there are console games for that. And MMO's.
And if the 'cool effects' you think make combat more exciting are the 'mess the players over extra lots' type, like old school, no save level drain (which does not speed up anything about combat), again...
That's not really what I'm talking about when I say "cool and interesting combat", but a fair point that this is a bit non-descript concept that needs defining.
Cool and interesting can be any number of things and should actually probably be a bit of everything.
In the old school system, the core premise is that combat was short and violent and had a built-in narrative assumption. "Attacks" essentially boiled down to either a physical attack which was a single roll of the dice, or a spell effect. In either case it was resolved with a single cast of the die for example attacks were made with a single d20 and you either hit or missed, that was the entirety of your action that round.
Quite simplified but the core premise was that this was just a stage for a narrative depiction. What does that attack represent? The answer was, what you imagined it to be, how you described it. This was cool and interesting "enough" so long as you had a creative group and it worked BECAUSE it was part of a very short and very violent execution, aka, a quick combat. It probably would not work if it was a 2 hour slogfest, the intensity of its short duration was a core reason it worked. A typical fight would last 2-3 rounds, a big fight might last 4-6 but fights were quick and dirty either way, executed with extremely violent results, as you point out, often including catastrophically powerful monster and player effects that were often quite devastating to either side. The whole feel of combat was about this really high level of extremes.... stuff would die in one hit, and players or monsters could be paralyzed, petrified and outright killed with a single blow. It was very tense, very violent, very definitive.
Whether you liked that or not is a matter of taste, but there was nothing "boring" about it, each action of a player or monster was critical to the outcome of the battle.
Modern games lean more on the tactical element of the game which can also be very interesting and fun, less narrative, but the joy in it is using interesting and clever tactics, almost like solving a battle puzzle where you try to execute various abilities, powers, feats etc... in a back and forth chess match. We see this in games like 4th edition D&D, Pathfinder 2e and the likes. In such a system, monsters must have lots of clever levers to pull on to counter the levers the players have so that this tactical combat is challenging and interesting, that there is a puzzle to solve.
5e, basically does neither of those. It is not short and violent with that narrative edge and tense resolution, nor is it an interesting tactical game because the monsters basically attack and damage you and their main "defense" is their bag of hit points. Nothing interesting happens in tactical combat in 5e but it takes a long time to resolve anyway. The only people pulling on levers are players and really there are no tactics involved, you just execute the abilities that deal the most damage to reduce HP as quickly as possible. Im not even sure why they bother with minis as things like Opportunity Attacks lock down combat to a standstill and roll-off anyway.
So when I say cool and interesting, I can go either way and there are other methods beyond these two that could be implemented, there are plenty of ways to skin this cat, but 5e doesn't employ any of them. Its all quite boring and stale.
As for homebrewing, again, I have no issue and agree that homebrewing is a core part of being a DM, but I don't think homebrewing refers to re-designing the game to make it fun to play. Like, that should be part of the core architecture and its simply not.
Homebrewing is also working off the precedent. When a system works in a certain way, you work from that to adjust, adapt, tweak. You don't need to look past this forum to see how people "howbrew" adjusted difficulty for example. The common answer is, give monsters more or less hit points to make them harder or easier... of course that's the advice, that is the precedence of monster design in 5e, bags of hit points.. Its how you scale the difficulty. Quite boring in my opinion.
In the old school system, the core premise is that combat was short and violent and had a built-in narrative assumption. "Attacks" essentially boiled down to either a physical attack which was a single roll of the dice, or a spell effect. In either case it was resolved with a single cast of the die for example attacks were made with a single d20 and you either hit or missed, that was the entirety of your action that round.
Have you actually played Basic or AD&D? Because that's just... not true. While it's true that both monsters and PCs were glass cannons by the standards of 3e on upwards, there was no shortage of multiple attacks and abilities with weird mechanics.
In the old school system, the core premise is that combat was short and violent and had a built-in narrative assumption. "Attacks" essentially boiled down to either a physical attack which was a single roll of the dice, or a spell effect. In either case it was resolved with a single cast of the die for example attacks were made with a single d20 and you either hit or missed, that was the entirety of your action that round.
Have you actually played Basic or AD&D? Because that's just... not true. While it's true that both monsters and PCs were glass cannons by the standards of 3e on upwards, there was no shortage of multiple attacks and abilities with weird mechanics.
There are some, but your overstating it, it's pretty minimal and the added elements don't change the core premise.
Edit: For clarity before you start showing me monsters that have multiple attacks. While true there was that sort of thing, the general way this worked out the more attacks a monster had, the less monsters you fought at the same time. The end result was that combat speeds up, not slows down at higher levels. There are mathematically fewer attacks when fighting say one Bullette with 3 attacks compared to say fighting 6 goblins.
More to the point, the more attacks you had in a single action, the more damage you did, the quicker and more violent the game became. It also gave you more narrative steam to work from, its more fun to describe multiple attacks. In essence, the formula got stronger and the premise was more re-affirmed the more attacks a monster had.
I have at least 10 years more gaming experience than OP and have played all the old editions back to BECMI (oops, except 4e, my bad). My DM has played for even longer than that starting with Chainmail 3e. It’s not something I bring up very often because it doesn’t really matter. It’s an appeal to authority, a logical fallacy, to refer to one’s experience rather than make a sensible argument that others can understand and which holds up to scrutiny.
Edit: I just realized OSR4ever is not the OP. Apologies for conflating the two. OP has not made an appeal to authority.
BECMI Basic and a little AD&D. Probably somewhere between 1st and 2nd Ed. I played when 2e was coming out but my DM was old school. I remember THAC0 and it's not nearly as hard as people make it out to be. I lost interest, came back for 5e, but have had friends that played 3 and 4.
My friend still had 4th edition rules, and I looked at the phb, and was like "f*** that" and was more interested in reading her other TTRPG game handbooks...
So, getting back to the OP, lol...
Please pardon me for how I mangled the quoted section above -- my goal is to highlight the points you raise so I can step back and really get into those things. I will use the same numbering I dropped in the above.
1) I agree with this as a "feeling" -- especially around the nature of the Features gained, but more importantly in the sense of not feeling as if they are earned. Fundamentally, they are earned, of course -- the character advanced a level, and presto, they get the ability. About two-thirds of the way through my last campaign, when the players hit level 13 or so, the players started to feel that really strongly, especially as the scope and realization of what the campaign would entail started to become clearer. In my fellow DM team* meetings, we decided that we would start doing the advancement as a roleplay mechanic -- to advance a level, they have to go and do something to learn how to do that. This has had an impact; downtime, a thing we call "montages"**, and sometimes little fetch quests under the direction of an NPC teacher. I don't recommend it for everyone, because it takes effort, time, and usually involves setting up something to justify all of it, plus you have to balance a bunch f individual play sessions in a collective manner and it is just flat out hard.
2) We used to do something like our solution to 1 above in the 90's, which is where the idea came from. However, note that one of the big shifts was that they took all those things you would learn to do in 5e from all the magic items that you would fight for in 2e. This contributes to the feeling -- for each really cool ability, there is an adventure, a story behind it, and that is lost unless you find a way to bring it back, which is why the "training montage". We try to make the experience feel like they have to do something to get the feature. In the upcoming campaign, this is a major part of the plotlines.
3) We achieved this by focusing more on development of characters. We are big on role playing collectively (not so much individually), so the overall impact starts at the Zero Sessions (we typically have two to four). During this, we collectively create our characters in a nice friendly chaotic mess that allows the DM for that Campaign to be involved and collect potential key notes from everyone. Big focus on personality and personal versus cultural values (we add a bunch of things to this). In short, we take the time to develop them, and the group effort style mans everyone plays off each other and challenges each other so there are rarely a lot of "i play this kind of character and only this kind" stuff. The last session of this sort is always a pure role play session where the players have the task of figuring out how they all ended up together, so DMs don't have to railroad them to start the game.
4) We do get this sometimes. Mostly among our younger players, who often want to be better than Mom, Dad, or Sibling, or feel like they aren't contributing enough. No solution: we just let them do it.
5) Technically, in 5e, this is true of all the classes. The "cool thing at every level" stuff that makes them superheroes. For my next campaign, I seriously undercut that, while still giving them the something at every level bit. It is a straight homebrew, based wholly in the setting, and essentially throws them into an option pool because I rewrote all 17 classes to fit the world and created a new way of dealing with such things that mitigates the need for sub-classes while preserving player options/choices.
6) The very first almost enraged bit of our learning 5e was that they essentially killed the things that in 1e/2e had made Rogues so important and special. While we understood the basis of "well, aren't these things anyone can do?", we didn't like that they didn't let Rogues be extra special good at it. So we have been tweaking the Ability Skills and I even brought in some ideas from 2e to sorta amp this up in the form of NW Proficiencies. That is carrying forward to next campaign, and while I am sure some folks would say the approach "breaks bounded accuracy", we don't give a fig. It is more fun for us this way. Each DM has a different way of handling this, though.
7) Given the UA discussion, I am willing to bet the minmaxers would disagree, but I understand your point here. I have a personal investment in the importance of knowledge, and since we do have a lot of teens and early 20's folks, us old folks have an interest in showing the why education and learning is important -- why is it that a Wizard (who, presumably, has spent all their time learning magic and not had time to learn sword craft) have the same ability to use a long sword as a fighter, who presumably had to train for hours in the use of it? Different solutions by each of the DMs, including a couple who changed nothing.
8) Different solutions, but we did collectively decide that we all wanted to use a spell point system and I confess we essentially re-created the magic system for some of our games. We still use the standard in some campaigns, but by and large we are moving over to the new magic system. It doesn't have concentration in the traditional sense, but it does engage the action economy directly, requires verbal and somatic components for everything, and is a bit more narrative and supports building drama. Also not recommended for everyone.
9) in 5e, the reason they have the rarity system is to essentially argue in a very light handed way that Tier 1 characters shouldn't have magic items, tier two should have one, tier three should have two, tier four should have three. This presumes items that require attunement, which we all still have as far as I know. A couple have gone to five items, and others have been playing with the attunement system. Since I am re-introducing +5 and +4 weapons (always in the Legendary class) for my next campaigns, I basically restructured how magic items were organized to reflect the setting (which has a place that creates some very common and practical magical items (candle wand: lights candles) and has rules for creating magical items I expect my players will take advantage of). Literally anyone can create a magical item. It just ain't easy and they can't do it alone unless they really know magic well and are very experienced. It was possible because we re-did the spell system.
10) "but the reward is how much we love each other!" Ok, ok, yeah, this is a problem and that's linked to the above. Magical items are rare, comparatively. I don't usually give them to NPCs myself, and I more or less follow the unstated suggestion that magical items have a purpose in the story rather than be a Power Up. Older versions of D&D treated magical items as the equivalent of the special power up for a character. 5e says they aren't and shouldn't be important, and I disagree, so we also have magical items that duplicate a lot of the features, which means in the "Aspect System"*** folks can choose a different path in developing their character. So suddenly, magical items have become a key point in character development, and can even change an entire build.
11) Variable solutions, including none. In my case, because the new system wipes out concentration, and the mana usage is interesting, we essentially give metamagic to everyone if they want it, and it uses mana to change spell properties (except for casting time and components) in a way that mixes the "at higher level" and metamagic changes. It increases the creativity -- and I note that we also really put a lot of work into elemental spells and created a system for mage duels.
None of the above is the "best" or even "better" than 5e, it is simply different and how we addressed complaints we have. I am only responsible for about half of them, and then only because I have been creating a whole new world of large scale, which I haven't done in probably eight years or so, having done smaller worlds/settings that didn't need much. But all of us wanted to go back to an immersive model, and I had an itch to do some mythopoet stuff, so it has become a thing.
* = My group is 27 regulars with up to 6 others who float in and out, and there are 6 DMs, who meet about once a quarter to discuss things for characters moving between campaigns/one shots/playtesting, rulings, and general rules thoughts. Collectively, the principals have been playing together since 1980, and everyone else is a friend or family member of them.
** = Training Montage; we are all huge movie buffs (well, except for the kids, who are video game fans), and I mean that in the 'we will have group sessions and critique the hell out of a film's writing, direction, acting, cinematography, etc.' way that can get annoying and is so spoiler filled we have rules on who can join us. We stole the idea from action films. The mechanic is four to six "this is what happens" with a (DM start, Player response, DM close) format that round-robins each "happens" for each player. This is also when "downtime crafting" happens.
*** = Aspect System is what we are calling the way I reset the idea of subclass/feats and other "gained over time" stuff into a series of options that are in addition to Core Archetype capabilities that are part of the class. It will all be a thing that is released free for folks to tear into tiny bits in December.
Have I "actually played earlier editions"?
Yeah. I was a snob and thought less of the B/X editions, and started and stayed with AD&D (1e), and didn't really like the way the Basic/Expert sets where set up as game stuff (I thought them rather juvenile - but I was rather juvenile at the time, soooo) and I outright laughed and mocked and eerided the BECMI set that was that line's version of 2e. Killing it when they went to 3e was one of the best ideas they had, I recall thinking.
Fortunately, I have aged somewhat well on the mental and emotional fronts ;)
(Edited for minor things that annoyed me)
Only a DM since 1980 (3000+ Sessions) / PhD, MS, MA / Mixed, Bi, Trans, Woman / No longer welcome in the US, apparently
Wyrlde: Adventures in the Seven Cities
.-=] Lore Book | Patreon | Wyrlde YT [=-.
An original Setting for 5e, a whole solar system of adventure. Ongoing updates, exclusies, more.
Not Talking About It / Dubbed The Oracle in the Cult of Mythology Nerds
They are official sample characters released by TSR for use in official modules. I don't know how they were generated -- I suspect they were actually characters from EGG's private games as they're a crazy mishmash of levels -- but they're most certainly representative of how the game was expected to be played.
I first played with blue box basic in, apparently, 1979, as I had the version that had chits instead of dice. I've played every edition except AD&D 2e.
Sorry. Stealing because I'm lazy.
1. Meh. Completely untrue/misrepresentation. I just looked over my sorcerer for an upcoming campaign and was surprised at the vast no man's land of abilities between 6 and 12, followed by a few ASI's. Maybe it's the subclass (aberrant mind) maybe it's dependent on choices I have yet to make, but not every level.
A lot of levels though. The proficiency bonus going up and the ASI's are a bad combo that will get you up near +10 far quicker than you probably should. Otherwise it's generally dependent on class. Most levels are just standard spell progression that's been there since AD&D or it's extra damage in one form or another that's about the same throughout editions.
2. Ok. Gold star? I'm a storyteller DM. I move their level up as they fight bigger things and need the level. I know, milestone isn't for everyone....
3. I dunno. I died quickly. Embarrassingly quickly in Advanced. Basic let me live a little longer. I was not happy with advanced killing me so quickly (bad die rolls), but I was never really attached to characters. They didn't live long enough.
4. Never saw character in 5e self terminate. I've seen players swap them out for something they find more fun to play.... but death is hard in 5e... and that's generally more the complaint.
5. Yeah... and....?
6. This IS my biggest problem. On a DC 10 check, even without proficiency, and with "meet it beats" you've got quite the edge in making a check. With prof bonus, it requires about a DC 15 to kinda get 50/50 odds, and with tools to give advantage? It's crazy.
And then back to those ASI's. 2 points means +1 to ALL checks under each stat. You could be a wizard that invests your ASI's in dex for ac staring at about 12 or 14 and by the end of it you're so good at sleight of hand you can pick most locks simply because your ASI's took you up to a 20 dex.
If your class is without any chance of knowing what to do and not having any tools, you can attempt crazy stuff and still have more than a modicum of a chance of pulling it off.
This isn't even to mention the bounded range is so narrow that most things become pass fail.
Now you can adjust the DC on a skill check up or down for a character, but that's a shrug and a guess as is and definitely too.ambiguous a judgement call.
The skills need some serious reworking.
7. And....? Everyone's weapon proficiencies are different, and the bulk of damage doesn't come from the weapon but the class features. I'm hazy on over 30 years of life experience in between now and last time I looked at it, but the weapon damage itself hasn't changed much and it still was about class granted damage and not what you swung with. Though I vaguely remember something about arrows that let you do multiple "shots" way back when in 2e's weapons and equipment supplement. Most of what happened simplified.
8. Spells being locked except upcast.....HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA... that's cute. In Advanced spells didn't upcast and you had to use a slot to memorize a spell for each instance of use. You want dancing lights 3 times buddy,(and dancing lights was about all you got level 1-3 ish) you had to have 3 instances of dancing g lights memorized. You have NOOOOOOOO clue what the hell you're talking about here... don't even get me started on the lack of cantrips...
9. Yeah a lot of people bemoan how meaningless money is. And how easy magic items break games. It concerns me and doesn't. I like magic items not being a make or break feature. You can run an entire campaign without them and that's awesome. Unfortunately you have to be extra careful giving them out. I wish they had more variety and flexibility than just plus 1's or spell charges that refill. Tbh they're pretty dull, but also that's the only thing players seem to care about and want.
Oh yeah. Gold. Most of the time in stories, unless poverty is a struggle to overcome, they handwave expenses. I guess it really hasn't come up, but it probably is a good idea to just deplete savings from time to time.
10. Attunement? Stops you from being overpowered as all shit. Which is what your complaint in 1through 6 are about. MOVING ON.....(yeah, that spell complaint really got me..)
11. Yeah, you can, and they can sell them... or whatever they want really. There's never been a game where they'll swap good equipment for worse. I don't swap out my steel hammer for a fisher price one because I happen to find it l, do I?
12. I swear you played 3 and you're a wizard main now complaining because wizards aren't overpowered enough. You talk about 1 and 2 but you have absolutely no goddamned clue about the magic user class from those games. 3 and 3.5, from all that the people I know who played it, indicate it was where 90% of these complaints come from and because you were SPOILED. 3was the game that was where you were beyond overpowered didn't have to concentrate metamagicked the hell out of everything, rules lawyers your DM into oblivion and had about 37 books to pick and choose your godlike optimized first level character's abilities.
In which case, pathfinder is for you. Not 1st or 2nd, or even 4th or 5th. And good luck.
I had to stop reading because I was getting an anxiety attack.
Clearly, your experience and mine vary. I have been DMing since 1979 and have played every version except 4. My favorite was 3.5, but I currently play 5. Each version of this game has had merit. People will have versions they prefer and versions they hate. DM’s kick out the rules they don’t like, such as the exploit that allows mages to avoid counterspells by readying their action, or the whole attunement thing (2 of my peeves). But that string of accusations about the game and it’s treatment of characters share no common ground with my experience. Characters don’t earn abilities? Of course they do…just like the characters of every other version. In D&D 2e, those characters could earn a +5 sword, but here they can only acquire one that’s plus 3. Game balance.
The rules of every expansion were more or less balanced to fit the big picture. If a DM disagrees with the merits of a rule, he or she has always had the power to remove or change it. My players are all old school, long-lived players. We have seen a lot in game and in life. We just completed a three year 5e campaign which was awesome. It wasn’t awesome because of the version we are playing, nor in spite of it. It’s because we had fun doing it together.
In the end, that should be the only thing that matters. So you and your friends should have fun playing any way you want.
Cheers.
That's fine but 1 was brutal. And 5 although a cake walk by comparison to 1 is not the system that is exploited to hell and back.
all of the statements read of someone who likes the min/max experience but wants to complain of power creep.
Starting off with comparisons to 1 and then bringing up DMing since 79.... it's not going to make me bow down to you.
Look. 5e is a simple edition. By the way the UA's are being complained about and the changes they are wanting g to implement, chances are they're going to come out with something much more closely aligned to 3.5 because there's way too many people trying to minmax right now, and I'm going to have to sit this one out till 7e comes about.
Like I said, I got my 5e books, I got copies of basic BECMI and I got AD&D. I can wait till it shifts back again, or I can just give up the hobby entirely. I got plenty of other stuff to do.
But I will NOT play crunchy fancy calculator games.
TreantMonk, who is a notorious min-maxer, came out with a video today where he has calculated the DPR of many of the heavy hitters, and then compared it to the new and improved UA Warlock (remember, this is at least the 3rd crack by wotc at it for the new edition, and time is running short). He could not even fit the new warlock on the damage chart, because it was so out of whack with everything else.
THAT is the problem with 5e. wotc comes up with these "cool and fun" builds...but fun for who, exactly? Certainly not the other players, as they watch their chars being way out-performed by some I-win button. And most certainly not the DM, who has to deal with such a char. 5e is broken, and wotc is doubling down on that, not trying to fix it. If wotc was serious about improving the DM experience, they would be nerfing/banning many many of the subclasses they have created, not buffing everything in sight.
But no, that takes courage and foresight, and an understanding of the game. And the people that would appreciate such courage are NOT wotc's target market.
Yeah, I saw it. His videos are crap. It's white room and he talks out his ass about the rogue, especially the UA 6 "improvements" which were none except to sacrifice damage for piddly status effects.
That aside, their "updates" are trash because they're catering to that minmaxer crowd he's a part of. Like I said, cribbing notes from 3.5/pathfinder
The reality of game design is, a team needs both the "Here, cool idea!" person and the "You realize that the your idea is broken" person, and 5e is short on the latter. There's something of a fine line to walk -- you want something with enough quirks that people can have fun searching out the weird interactions, but not so many that it becomes broken.
Agreed but that's more staff and they won't be as creative as I'd like
I didn't miss that point, I just don't agree with it. You don't need to homebrew any rules to make 5e work, just the adventures. And the entire fun of being a DM (at least to me) is homebrewing the adventures, so I don't see the problem
I have said twice now that I completely agree the prepackaged adventure modules that WotC sells nowadays are ridiculously easy. Don't conflate them publishing stupidly easy adventures with the 5e system itself being easy. You can very easily write impossibly difficult adventures in 5e, and you can very easily write stupidly easy adventures in 2e. If the DM wants someone else to write the adventures and then play them as-written straight from the box, I definitely do agree that 2e would be superior for that type of DM. But that's a complaint about WotC adventures, not the 5e system
Again, this returns to the point with CR in relation to encounter design; they're looking to allow for enough flexibility of play that people can run a sequence of encounters without taxing the party. Plus keeping the premade adventures simple makes it easier for a group of people who all don't know much about D&D to pick one up and start playing. Some people might want to be "challenged", but most players would probably quickly get frustrated if the adventures they paid money for kept killing their characters rather than progressing. And, to address the issue of story quality, expecting a major stream tier campaign to come from an adventure book is just unrealistic; those are stories that are tailored to the players as they go, so there's no way you can break that down into something you could sell to the whole community.
And regarding the idea that DM's shouldn't be expected to homebrew, that's literally been the entire basis of D&D since pretty much the outset. They give you a framework, you build and expand on it to make it your own.
This is the part where we simultaneously agree and disagree.
I agree that adventure writing is bad, not just because it's easy, but it's also just bad adventure writing. I agree that this is not a system problem. Terrible adventure writing has been a problem through the "official" channels so far back as I can remember so adjusting, adapting and customizing adventures for your needs I agree is just part of the DM experience, I doubt most DM's see it as a burden.
That said, I do think that 5e has architectural design problems that require the DM in the course of adventure adaption and storywriting, to address these system problems.
For example, monster design is catastrophically bad, to such a point that there aren't any monsters in the monster manual that you can just use as written and have anything interesting happen in combat. The most common complaint I hear from 5e DM's is "combat is boring or slow, how do I fix it". The issue here is that monsters are just bags of hit points in what is definitively a game with a tactical mini-combat ecosystem that takes increasing amounts of time to execute with the increase in character levels. The monsters however don't do anything interesting tactically. Predominantly all monsters do is move and attack, which makes them pale in comparison to the various powers, abilities and executables that players have, reducing combat to a roll-off between the player's various abilities vs. monster bags of hit points.
This is just one of many architectural issues that DM's must address to make the game fun and exciting for players.
Other core issues include Class balance, the "expert skill problem", high-level scalability, the "magic solves everything" problem, the "alpha strike" problem, the "I go down and get up again, you can never keep be down" problem. There are so many fundamental issues and all of them creep up in the course of adventure and campaign writing because any one of these can completely spoil an otherwise interesting and fun adventure.
So homebrewing adventures, I fully agree is a DM tradition and expectation, re-designing the game to actually make adventures fun and interesting, that is not something that has ever been required or should be expected of the DM. The game system should work as designed, as written and we will simply have to agree to disagree, because no, I don't think 5e works at all as written. You have to make heavy alterations to force it to work and make it fun.
Now the good thing with 5e is that it's been around long enough that there have been supplements that address many of these issues, all of them are 3rd party supplements, but that is neither here nor there. For example Flee Mortals addresses the monster design issue quite expertly, so there are more options available for DM's today than ever before.
Brokeness in an RPG is not as clear-cut an issue as it is in other sorts of games. If you can build a multiclassed, pole-arm master, pact of the blade, hexblade, (or whatever) warlock with all your invocations and spells chosen to maximize your murder output, is that a problem? Maybe, but probably not. If your average melee warlock is consistently outclassing the fighters, then you have problem.
It's certainly something for them to take a look at, and maybe they'll take steps to rein it in, but if they do, it'll be because of the average case. And maybe their fixes will leave the warlock still a bit too much murder, or a bit too little, but it doesn't really matter unless it's significant enough to affect the feel.
(And I don't think they're trying to please the minmaxers with their changes. They're giving more options, and that always gives opportunities for optimizing, but it doesn't seem to me to be their goal. (Their actual goals seem to be murky. I think the licensing backlash has made either design or management extremely skittish about upsetting the player base (even though that would be a different kind of upset), and it's making them overconservative.))
That's not really what I'm talking about when I say "cool and interesting combat", but a fair point that this is a bit non-descript concept that needs defining.
Cool and interesting can be any number of things and should actually probably be a bit of everything.
In the old school system, the core premise is that combat was short and violent and had a built-in narrative assumption. "Attacks" essentially boiled down to either a physical attack which was a single roll of the dice, or a spell effect. In either case it was resolved with a single cast of the die for example attacks were made with a single d20 and you either hit or missed, that was the entirety of your action that round.
Quite simplified but the core premise was that this was just a stage for a narrative depiction. What does that attack represent? The answer was, what you imagined it to be, how you described it. This was cool and interesting "enough" so long as you had a creative group and it worked BECAUSE it was part of a very short and very violent execution, aka, a quick combat. It probably would not work if it was a 2 hour slogfest, the intensity of its short duration was a core reason it worked. A typical fight would last 2-3 rounds, a big fight might last 4-6 but fights were quick and dirty either way, executed with extremely violent results, as you point out, often including catastrophically powerful monster and player effects that were often quite devastating to either side. The whole feel of combat was about this really high level of extremes.... stuff would die in one hit, and players or monsters could be paralyzed, petrified and outright killed with a single blow. It was very tense, very violent, very definitive.
Whether you liked that or not is a matter of taste, but there was nothing "boring" about it, each action of a player or monster was critical to the outcome of the battle.
Modern games lean more on the tactical element of the game which can also be very interesting and fun, less narrative, but the joy in it is using interesting and clever tactics, almost like solving a battle puzzle where you try to execute various abilities, powers, feats etc... in a back and forth chess match. We see this in games like 4th edition D&D, Pathfinder 2e and the likes. In such a system, monsters must have lots of clever levers to pull on to counter the levers the players have so that this tactical combat is challenging and interesting, that there is a puzzle to solve.
5e, basically does neither of those. It is not short and violent with that narrative edge and tense resolution, nor is it an interesting tactical game because the monsters basically attack and damage you and their main "defense" is their bag of hit points. Nothing interesting happens in tactical combat in 5e but it takes a long time to resolve anyway. The only people pulling on levers are players and really there are no tactics involved, you just execute the abilities that deal the most damage to reduce HP as quickly as possible. Im not even sure why they bother with minis as things like Opportunity Attacks lock down combat to a standstill and roll-off anyway.
So when I say cool and interesting, I can go either way and there are other methods beyond these two that could be implemented, there are plenty of ways to skin this cat, but 5e doesn't employ any of them. Its all quite boring and stale.
As for homebrewing, again, I have no issue and agree that homebrewing is a core part of being a DM, but I don't think homebrewing refers to re-designing the game to make it fun to play. Like, that should be part of the core architecture and its simply not.
Homebrewing is also working off the precedent. When a system works in a certain way, you work from that to adjust, adapt, tweak. You don't need to look past this forum to see how people "howbrew" adjusted difficulty for example. The common answer is, give monsters more or less hit points to make them harder or easier... of course that's the advice, that is the precedence of monster design in 5e, bags of hit points.. Its how you scale the difficulty. Quite boring in my opinion.
Homebrewing from scratch, meaning just trying to create something is not "simple"... I mean take stuff people are talking about right now like this post. https://www.dndbeyond.com/forums/d-d-beyond-general/general-discussion/180540-did-i-make-my-monster-right Guy made a monster and its pretty crap (no offense to him) but building stuff from scratch is not easy. Homebrewing is adjusting, tweaking, re-using, not designing from scratch.
Have you actually played Basic or AD&D? Because that's just... not true. While it's true that both monsters and PCs were glass cannons by the standards of 3e on upwards, there was no shortage of multiple attacks and abilities with weird mechanics.
There are some, but your overstating it, it's pretty minimal and the added elements don't change the core premise.
Edit: For clarity before you start showing me monsters that have multiple attacks. While true there was that sort of thing, the general way this worked out the more attacks a monster had, the less monsters you fought at the same time. The end result was that combat speeds up, not slows down at higher levels. There are mathematically fewer attacks when fighting say one Bullette with 3 attacks compared to say fighting 6 goblins.
More to the point, the more attacks you had in a single action, the more damage you did, the quicker and more violent the game became. It also gave you more narrative steam to work from, its more fun to describe multiple attacks. In essence, the formula got stronger and the premise was more re-affirmed the more attacks a monster had.
Short answer is yes, Im actively running B/X now.